Microsoft is still playing catchup in the world of open source software, but it turned a corner on Wednesday, announcing that its Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 developer tools will both support Git, the version control system widely used by open source projects.
Git was created by Linus Torvalds — the father of Linux — and it has become one of the world’s most popular code-management tools, gradually displacing long-time incumbents CVS and Subversion. It underpins the extremely popular code hosting/collaboration service GitHub, and it’s so important to the way Google works that the company hired the project’s current lead developers, Junio Hamano and Shawn Pearce, to work on Git full-time.